Sun Into Sea

A site for occasional translations of Portuguese Poetry.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Olá amigos! The second installment in this blog is work by Ruy Ventura (b. 1973), a poet from the Alto Alentejo region of Portugal. He has published several books in Portugal, including Architecture of Silence, Seven Capitals of The World, How To Leave A House and Breath Instruments. The following work is a selection from Ignition Key (2009). He has published poetry books in Spanish, organized anthologies, done translations, written many essays and has an interesting poetry blog called Estrada do Alicerce.

Here’s what Ruy has to say about his poetry:

Poetry being a counterliterature, an edifying element of a countercultural demand, the art produced by one who writes will always have an element of confrontation. First, a confrontation with language and, at the same time, an instrument of communication. Later, a permanent struggle with the society that uses this language and expels from its body all the strange and estranging presences. And in the end, an uninterrupted battle against the expressive tradition of a community.

This does not mean that poetry should be an uprooted art. A writer has roots in the land to which s/he belongs, is conscious of the presence of these roots, knows how to use them to live and braces one’s self against the storms and earthquakes of existence. Despite this, everything tears away, exposes itself, subverts—because the writer knows the distance between poetry and versification, between the marvelous and monotony, between mystery and previsibility, between rupture and continuity.

In the poems I have been writing I try to describe destroying description, to narrate destroying narration. More than a poet, I consider myself an investigator of the inversion of the material and immaterial world that surrounds me. In my opinion, poetry is not good for representing reality nor for relating (historicizing) the world-view of human beings, but just—and this is enough—to present the ruptures, gaps and the open retreats in the crust that sustains us and gives form to our animated corporeal form. Aboard a tangible/visible material or an intangible/invisible reality, I try to make my poetry a concretization of the ineffable and, simultaneously, the revelation of “spirituality” of the concrete world. To concretize the concrete or spiritualize the ineffable is to piss into the ocean, making poor and destroying art. Butchering the words of a Spanish poet, we must ally ourselves with the existent, but dead, the inexistent, but alive. Neither concrete nor abstract are properly poetry, said Vitorino Nemésio. Poetry will always be “an other “ an “I-don’t-know-what;” it will always belong to the domain of the indeterminate.

Like any other that writes, I am one who has been contaminated. I don’t speak of influences the way Bloom does, which oozes hierarchy—and, in the end, all writers create their own ancestors, as Jorge Luis Borges writes. The Brazilian poet Márcio-André says it well: “Contamination does not begin by exchanging hierarchies between a contaminator and a contaminated; in truth, both are mutually contaminated. … we can only be contaminated by something that is already in us, insofar as that is a possibility.”

Nothing exists, everything coexists. Bernardo Soares was right.

from Ignition Key / Chave de ignição

“…when one is born, there isn’t yet a traveler. Heavy tears are the first drops of Spirit. … Dispersed lights wait for the only pauses permitted, and the living kingdom, lowering to crematorium fire of the bellies, breathes into a new form.”

I burn everything in this room—in the place where your bodysplits.the bell tower remains.the soul is rebornwith dust.becomes part of the mountains—that arrives, stays,shakes with a shelterdug in the cliff—.the rock receives your body.disappears. just a tearbetween two lichensrecords the depthof the cells.

we project this film onto memory.like stained glass, night transfigures us.receives us without removing the blindfoldfrom this happiness (beauty or hallucination).

the mountains light this facebetween the foundation and transcendence of speech.we illuminate the landto arrive at this source.we multiply the image.far away, colors disappear.forms descend on objectsas mystery or anxiety.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Olá amigos! Welcome to SUN INTO SEA, a site for occasional translations of contemporary Portuguese poetry. The first poet I'll introduce is Jorge Melícias (b. 1970), author of several books of poetry and translation. His most recent book, disrupção, is a collection of his previously published work. More translation of his work, and an essay of mine on it, can be found at Duration Press.

Here's what Jorge has to say about his poetry:

As Roland Barthes reminds us “writing is not an instrument of communication, it is not an open road where only one linguistic intention travels.” In this sense, a writer’s choice of a certain tone or form (and, in choosing, the writer distinguishes himself to the same extent that he commits) will be, forcedly, a choice of conscience and not of efficiency. Before whatever one admits or excludes, style will inscribe itself, always, in the sphere of liberty, though, in a larger sense, this same style can turn into both a grandeur and a prison of writing. Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay "Resistance de la Poésie" tells us that poetry “makes in difficulty.” From this perspective he speaks not of an access to meaning but of an access of meaning. More than a dialectical process this moment will always be a solitary victory. One can no longer look for, whatever the cost, an access point to meaning but must accept it as an invasive and totalizing presence, without any cession or reprieve. The paradox resides, in my poetry, in uniting to this suffusion of meaning a growing demand for rigor, even if all exactitude will remain approximate. Like one who, stubbornly, erects dams in the blood, tightening the siege more and more upon the impossibility of saying.

For me beauty is inextricably linked with violence. A burst violence, trussed, as latent as it is recidivist. I don’t think much of beauty in its passive eloquence, all of its animation stolen, like a finished product. I think, sincerely, that the poem is not the territory of ethics or of redemption. And this pedagogical character, almost salvationist, of writing is something that I do not understand. I assume, in my poetry, this pure negativity. And I think that only through the reiteration of horror is some reprieve from guilt possible.

I want every poem to be a gift of pure violence. But a violence veiled by the square, as if only angularly would it be possible to foreshorten horror. A butchery without blood, an ablation so exact that nothing would extravasate.

About Me

Brian Strang's paintings, which all contain written poetic text, have been exhibited many times over the last ten years in solo and group shows, have been republished in magazines and currently reside in many private collections. He has lived in East Oakland for fifteen years and teaches English at San Francisco State University. His most recent poetry collection, Dark Adapt, is available at Duration Press. His artwork, poems, reviews, essays and translations have appeared in many journals including New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, The Denver Quarterly and Caliban. He plays guitar in Crow Crash Radio.